Anna Rose > Recent Status Updates

Oh god I forgot about “they can control the weather” —how was that not satire?! Kinda blasphemous tbh, thought yall said god did that? 🤔

Every time I listen to this book I cry. Ugh !!!

Cried for like 10 min of listening to this while making dinner. We were so close to having a president and vp who were competent, intelligent, likable, human, etc. I can’t believe where we ended up instead. I am truly mourning.

“Why give away control of something you own when you don’t have to?”
“We’ve been at Quite for almost ten years, it’s time for something else.”
“I don’t know why we have to give up control in order to have that.”
Followed by “You were very engaged, must have felt good.” - “Sure, wonderful.”
—if this isn’t the most unsubtle foreshadowing I’ll eat my hat

“But it’s California, these women are young, and we’re by the ocean. I want to wear flowers.”

“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”
“She had loved her parents more than she ever knew…and she forgave them completely.”

How have I never heard of Dunbar’s number? Bookmarked several articles just now, and starting a note to number my acquaintances lol

Simon & Garfunkel mentioned :,) by someone I KNEW would be significant and believe will continue to be. 🕵🏼‍♀️

“It feels like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays.”

"The only way to learn is to live!”

“Anyway, just be kind and… Just be kind.”

^this was literally my dating app bio (“just be kind”) because that’s what I didn’t have in my last relationship when I met Jackson (through the dating app lol)—was it AU me?!

“Life is strange…How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that's not the whole picture…The tree that is our life develops branches…departing from the trunk at different heights… branching off again, heading in often opposing directions…becoming twigs…all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale.”

“Things had faded between them until their friendship became just a vapour trail of sporadic Facebook and Instagram likes and emoji-filled birthday messages.”

This is such a depressing fate for friendships and I hate relating to this sentence. Should probably make some calls and book some flights.

“I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife…the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me.”

P. 211 of WTOSIOTL

“I was asked this question by the manager, who was a Mormon: if you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying?
At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might first appear, a kind of koan of the period.

“A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”
“I remember all the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

Again, 1968 or 2026

“I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable.”

This is 1968 but it could have been 2026.

"By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

P.188 WTOSIOTL

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises or all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition I found troubling."

“By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and bases does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises or all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition I found troubling.”

“He has made a promise to himself to every day find a new reason to keep going. Some of these reasons are little reasons, they are tastes he likes, they are symphonies he likes, they are paintings he likes, buildings he likes, operas and books he likes, places he wants to see, either again or for the first time. Some of these reasons are obligations: because he should. Because he can.”

“He was tired, he was in pain, but it didn’t matter; his tiredness felt like something sweet and warm, his pain was familiar and expected, and in those moments he was aware that he was capable of joyfulness, that life was honeyed.”

“He didn’t want to try to make Jude, or himself, do something neither of them wanted to because they were supposed to. Their relationship was, he felt, singular but workable: he didn’t want to be taught otherwise. . .

But now they were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

Re: “If This Were a Movie” final monologue: Is this why genies can only grant three wishes :/

Interesting concept, will be assessing both silently and likely verbally for research purposes!

“Ad you got older, you realized that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. So: happy. Yes, he was happy. He didn’t have to think about it, not really.”

“He wished someone would tell him that he was still a full human being despite his feelings; that there was nothing wrong with who he was. Surely there was someone, *someone* in the world who felt as he did? Surely his hatred for the act was not a deficiency to be corrected but a simple matter of preference?”

Crying but good crying

“His friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real.”
Now see this is what I like about this book, let’s get back to the friendship and stay there please I’m scared

This is becoming a laborious read and I’m starting to resent this book. You can do disturbing without so mainly details. Honestly starting to wonder who/what all these many details are for. And over and over. Idk I saw someone refer to this book as torture porn and now I’m like oh my god is that why this is the way it is? Trying to push through but by god they’re not making it easy.

Wow I’ve been reading this book for 7 months (months and weeks have gone by where I’ve taken breaks to be fair) anyway, nothing little about this life or this book